Totally agree. There is a lot of value in having everything around you going smoothly so you can focus on your work. We have to book travel ourselves but every time I do it there is some kind of problem that takes hours to resolve. It would be so nice to have somebody who knows how to navigate the corporate process. It's not only the time but it's very distracting.

Sounds like DevOps to me.

No way.

The Dev/Ops interface is one with very little information hiding, little responsibility segregation, very little outcome independence, and nearly no knowledge differentiation.

The researcher/admin interface separates things with complete opposite qualities on each of those dimensions.

In all my experiences with devops, I’ve had to do their jobs for them in their entirety, but by proxy: “ok, first type ‘sudo service https start’. Now type ‘cd /var/log/httpd’. Then type...” Except I have to do it all up front, and if I miss an (obvious) step, somebody who ought to have no business yelling at me yells at me for providing incomplete instructions.

I thought DevOps folks are people who take an engineering mindset to operations, i.e. with both skills of software engineering and system administration? What you're describing sounds like someone with neither skillset.

Ah, yes, the DevOps blues... I sing it daily :(